The tech giant is going to refurbish and sell its Note 7 phones that were previously recalled for safety reasons. Samsung explains that it’s the best way to manage its stockpile in an environmentally friendly manner. The company is going to sell them as “refurbished phones or rental phones”, but first it will consult regulators in various markets.

DeepMind Health, Google’s health tech branch, is going to use a new technology loosely based on Bitcoin to allow hospitals, the NHS and even patients to track their personal data in real-time mode. Google’s plan is dubbed “Verifiable Data Audit” and aims to create a digital ledger automatically recording every interaction with patient data. In other words, any changes to or access of the data would be tracked and visible.

A messaging app called Confide, reportedly mostly used by White House staffers due to its “military-grade end-to-end encryption,” appeared so insecure it allowed intruders to spy on contact information, impersonate friendly contacts and alter messages in transit. Once security researchers discovered these vulnerabilities, the company mostly fixed these insecurities, but it is known that an attacker could have taken full advantage before this month.

Apple is currently investigating claims that an iPhone 7 Plus exploded due to battery issues. The problem was raised on Twitter, where users have published a video and photos of the damaged phone. They show the back of a rose gold iPhone 7 Plus being deformed by a swollen battery and smoke flowing out of a crack in the side of the smartphone.

The smartphone maker has blamed Galaxy Note 7 batteries for causing its flagship smartphone to overheat and catch fire. This fault led to the recall of all Note 7 devices and damaged consumer confidence in Samsung.

Representatives of the world’s biggest maker of smartphones made an official announcement, saying that the exhaustive tests had ruled out any problems with the hardware or software. At the same time, internal and independent investigations have concluded that it was the fault of batteries.

It turned out that the casing of the original battery was too small, causing it to short-circuit and ignite. Samsung then replaced it with a battery with a different manufacturing defect (which ironically led to the same result). The company was forced to recall over 2.5 million smartphones in September 2016 and then permanently end their production in October. Financial experts estimate that this move could cost Samsung $5.3bn in lost profits.

The company explained that it had spent a few months putting all efforts and resources into determining the cause of the incidents, examining hardware and software of the device, as well as related processes, such as assembly, quality assurance testing, and logistics. 700 engineers and researchers conducted tests on more than 20,000 fully assembled devices and over 300,000 batteries. As a result, the problem with the original lithium-ion battery was traced to its internal structure comprising layers of positive and negative electrodes. It was found that the battery was squashed in one corner in some cases, forcing the tips of the layer of negative electrodes to curve over. In the replacement batteries produced by a different supplier, the problem was caused by punctures in a super-thin component separating the positive and negative electrodes, along with faulty insulation.

Cybercriminals tried to block access to 20 million UK accounts of Lloyds Banking Group during 48-hour DDoS attack. Lloyds, Halifax and Bank of Scotland were bombarded with millions of fake requests, which usually aim at demanding a ransom from the target. However, the banking group assured that no accounts were hacked or compromised, and it did not pay any ransom. The bank’s IT security experts “geo-blocked” the source of the attack which allowed them to cut out the server launching the attacks, but this also made legitimate customer unable to access the bank too. Once the hackers understood their server was identified, they moved to another one. The bank declined to comment on the specific nature of the attack.

The chair of the House of Commons Treasury select committee called for the financial industry to create a single point of responsibility to tackle cyber risks, pointing at the necessity of higher level of scrutiny and accountability for existing arrangements with customers being exposed to the risks of cybercrime.

A few months ago, a much more serious attack targeted Tesco Bank and resulted in the loss of £2.5m from 9,000 accounts. A few other major UK banks have also experienced service outages over the past several years due to DDoS attacks. For example, a year ago, a DDoS attack made HSBC’s Internet banking facility unavailable, but no transactions were affected at the time. Before that, Royal Bank of Scotland admitted that it suffered a hacking attack on its online services when monthly paychecks were arriving in accounts.

The chancellor, Philip Hammond, promised to spend an extra £1.9bn protecting UK online defenses, with out-of-date computer systems being exploited by hackers to target everyone everywhere. This money will support the newly created National Cyber Security Centre under the surveillance agency GCHQ. The chair of the Treasury select committee believes that responsibility for addressing online threats is shared too widely among several bodies, including the Prudential Regulatory Authority, the Financial Conduct Authority and GCHQ. As such, it is probably time to consider a single point of responsibility for online risk in the financial services sector.

Bitcoin has started new year with a surge: its value hit a 3-year high of more than $1,000. The cryptocurrency has long been criticized as a vehicle for illegal activities like drug dealers and tax evaders, but in the end it outperformed all its central-bank-issued counterparts with a 125% climb in value last year.

Peter Singer, a leading geopolitical strategist, believes that the US tech firms refrain from providing their cyberwarfare services to the Pentagon in order to avoid jeopardizing their relationship with the Chinese market.

Police found and arrested two armed robbers (one of whom shot an officer in the face to avoid arrest) thanks to a phone-tracking mobile application. The armed robbers entered a tavern and ordered staff to open the safe to steal the day’s takings. Aside from a bag of cash, they also unwittingly stole a mobile phone of one of the employees, which had the “find my phone” app on it. The phone owner activated the app from a computer, and the police managed to track the device (and the robbers carrying it) through a nearby park and back yards.